Rosemary Sorenson profiles Venero Armanno in "The Australian" as his latest novel, The Dirty Beat, is published by University of Queensland Press.
One of his novels, The Volcano, took 10 years to complete and none of his other six books had the almost uncannily easy transition to the page that he found with The Dirty Beat. This one, he believes, came gushing out of him as though the two words, dirty beat, had opened a dam he'd closed up all those years ago, when he turned away from [his university band]."It came out so fast because behind it was 25 years of not talking about it, of not wanting to confront the thing," Armanno says. "We had actually thought we were building something and when it became apparent we weren't getting anywhere it hurt so much. We had tried hard with that creative thing, and I genuinely loved the guys, but after the end of the band I didn't see them again. I don't think I could face it, so I had to deny it all."
